Alabama native & MIT alum. I write about all things finance. Check me out on U.S. News & World Report!
Joined April 2015
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6 Aug 2019
Had a great chat with Option Genius Allen Sama! Check him out if you're curious about selling options.
2 Aug 2019
How To Make 400% With Financial Journalist Wayne Duggan| The Option Genius Podcast Episode [#51] OptionGenius.com optiongenius.libsyn.com/how-…
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Jun 3
Moral of the story - do NOT chase hot IPOs
Year-1 average drawdown = 55%
Year-1 median drawdown = 54%
Table: Truist
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Tesla says its Full Self-Driving software is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. But the figures don't withstand scrutiny – and staffers who trained the technology say it isn't close to safely delivering autonomous vehicles at scale reut.rs/4nZIuM8
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
May 11
How tf is this even possible
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When Tesla announced an expansion of its robotaxis to Dallas and Houston last month, some investors touted momentum for CEO Elon Musk’s mission to transform the electric-vehicle maker into an AI-powered, driverless-tech giant. Reuters reporter Norihiko Shirouzu recently tested Tesla’s robotaxis in Dallas, however, and found them to still be in a beta-testing phase.
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
May 3
Tesla is the most successful CON in the history of capital markets.
Not because the cars are bad.
But because the entire business is engineered to impress on first glance and collapse under scrutiny. And the culture around it has made facts completely IRRELEVANT.
I've never seen a company where the gap between what is promised and what is delivered is this wide, for this long, with this little accountability.
Tesla's Full Self-Driving system is marketed as autonomy. But it is not autonomy. It is a camera-only system running probabilistic inference.
The car is making statistical guesses about what it sees, thousands of times per second, with no redundancy when those guesses are wrong.
Probabilistic inference controlling a two-ton vehicle at highway speed with your family inside.
NHTSA has two open investigations covering 3.2 million Tesla vehicles. One was escalated to a formal Engineering Analysis in March after 9 crashes, including a fatality, where the system FAILED to detect sun glare, fog, and dust. The cameras went blind and the car kept driving.
In Austin, Tesla's robotaxi fleet has reported 15 crashes across roughly 800,000 miles. One crash every 57,000 miles.
The average American driver has a police-reported crash every 500,000 miles. Tesla's robotaxis crash at roughly 4x the human rate, WITH a safety monitor sitting in the car whose only job is to prevent crashes.
Waymo operates over 2,500 fully driverless vehicles across multiple cities with no human backup and maintains a crash rate 85% below human drivers across 127 million autonomous miles. Tesla has ONE unsupervised vehicle in a tiny section of Austin.
But here's what really makes Tesla different from every overvalued company I've ever analyzed:
The facts do not matter to the people who own this stock.
Every missed deadline, every broken promise gets filtered through the same response: attack the messenger.
Call them a short seller. Call them a hater. Anything to avoid looking at the actual numbers.
It's an online ecosystem that has made itself completely immune to facts. And Musk baked that dynamic into the culture from the beginning.
Every time the fundamentals deteriorate, the faithful don't sell. They double down.
When your shareholder base treats every dip as a buying opportunity regardless of the data, the stock becomes untethered from reality entirely.
That's literally a religion with a ticker symbol.
I highly suggest you read Edward Niedermeyer's book Ludicrous on this.
And now it even gets WORSE...
CapeFearAdvisors published a piece this week that should be required reading.
Tesla's 2025 CEO Performance Award contains a change-of-control provision:
In the event of a change of control, ALL operational milestones are disregarded.
No million robotaxis, Optimus robots, or $400 billion EBITDA.
NONE of it.
So if SpaceX acquires Tesla at $8.5 trillion, every tranche of Musk's 423 million share award vests immediately. A single acquisition at that price triggers the full vesting of both plans at once, with no way to claw them back.
The milestones everyone argues about are just a distraction. The mechanism is the change-of-control language buried in the SEC filing.
This is about engineering the largest personal wealth transfer in modern financial history and using the narrative machine to keep the price elevated long enough to execute it.
I've seen every bust of the last four decades.
But this one is different because the cult of personality is stronger than anything I've witnessed. The movement around this stock cannot be touched by facts, and that is what makes it so dangerous.
But the math always wins. ALWAYS.
It just takes longer when the con is this good.
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Apr 29
The idea that Tesla is alone in the race to develop end-to-end vision system for self-driving and delivering into consumer vehicles is officially dead.
Like dead, dead.
I tested Xpeng's VLA 2.0 in the streets of Beijing, and it is comparable to my experience of daily driving Tesla FSD v14.
Xpeng is not charging $100 a month to drive this. It is inlcuded in its higher-trim vehicles and it already caught the attention of Volkswagen, which is going to integrate into its own vehicles - something Tesla hasn't been able to do despite trying.
You can watch the full 40-minute drive on @ElectrekCo
Apr 29
Xpeng VLA 2.0 test drive: Tesla is not alone with 'Full Self-Driving' anymore electrek.co/2026/04/29/xpeng… by @fredlambert
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Apr 24
More than 800 comments.
Plenty of people agreeing and bringing up even more points.
But look at the ones disagreeing.
Not one argument. Not one number. Not one counter-thesis.
Just insults and recycled claims I literally debunk in the post.
That's the entire case for Tesla in 2026.
I spent 45 years on Wall Street. I worked as Peter Lynch's assistant at Fidelity. I ran the #1 mutual fund in the country in 1984. I founded two hedge funds that each crossed a billion dollars. I've watched the Nifty Fifty, the 1987 crash, the Japan bubble, the dot-com mania, and 2008 play out in real time.
And the most sophisticated response the Tesla cult can bring up is a slur.
But what NO ONE did in these comments:
Nobody challenged a delivery number. Nobody defended the 50,000 vehicle inventory gap. Nobody explained why a company with shrinking revenue deserves a $1.5 trillion market cap. Nobody addressed the 38% sequential collapse in energy storage deployments. Nobody made the case for 300x earnings on a business that just discontinued two of its flagship vehicles.
And none of the dozens of other arguments.
BECAUSE THEY CAN'T
They don't own Tesla because they ran a DCF. They own it because a billionaire on social media told them to.
This is nothing more than a fan club with a brokerage account.
And every great bubble in financial history has looked exactly like this in its final innings.
Tulip traders didn't debate horticulture. Pets .com shareholders didn't model unit economics. Bear Stearns clients didn't stress-test the mortgage book.
They got angry at anyone who asked questions. They called the skeptics names. They treated doubt as heresy.
Then the math showed up like it ALWAYS DOES.
I don't need anyone in my replies to agree with me. I'm writing down what I see and letting the scoreboard do the talking.
Energy up 24% this year. Gold at all-time highs. Since I called Valaris and Tidewater on December 24, VAL is up 65% and TDW is up 50%.
The unglamorous, "boring", cash-generating corners of the market have been DESTROYING the crowded narrative trades.
Meanwhile the people screaming at me are down 14% YTD and holding.
Who's the delusional one here?
Apr 23
Last night was the biggest disaster in the history of Tesla.
Let me walk you through what actually happened on that earnings call, because the headlines are doing you a disservice:
Elon Musk got on the call and admitted (his words) that Hardware 3 "simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD."
He said he wished it were otherwise. He said the memory bandwidth is one-eighth of what Hardware 4 has. And that's the end of the conversation.
Approximately 4 million Tesla vehicles on the road right now have Hardware 3. Many of those owners paid $8,000 to $15,000 for Full Self-Driving capability based on Musk's repeated promises (going back to 2016) that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. As recently as 2022, Musk was publicly assuring owners that HW3 had the processing power to get it done.
BUT IT DIDN'T
Those promises are now officially broken.
The solution is a "discounted trade-in" toward a new car with Hardware 4.
Not a refund or a free upgrade...
A discount on buying ANOTHER Tesla.
Investor Ross Gerber said it too - all HW3 owners got screwed, and with roughly 285,000 FSD purchasers affected, the potential liability runs into the BILLIONS.
But that's not even the worst part.
Musk was asked if the current FSD v14.3 was ready for unsupervised deployment. He said yes. Then immediately walked it back and admitted Tesla has "major architectural improvements" in the pipeline that would significantly improve safety.
What he really means: the software isn't SAFE ENOUGH to deploy without a human watching. Full unsupervised FSD for consumer cars is pushed to Q4 2026. At the earliest... Maybe.
How many times has this deadline been pushed? I've lost count. And trust me, I've seen a lot of broken promises. But this one takes the cake.
Now let's talk about the numbers everyone is celebrating:
Tesla reported $22.4 billion in revenue and $0.41 in non-GAAP earnings. A "double beat." The stock popped 4% after hours. Victory, right?
WRONG
Dig into the actual filing:
The number one driver of operating income improvement wasn't cost reductions, wasn't volume growth, wasn't FSD revenue. It was - and Tesla listed this FIRST in their own shareholder letter - "one-time benefits related to warranty and tariffs."
They released warranty reserves. They booked tariff refund windfalls. They stretched supplier payments by 10 days. They took on billions in new debt. Then they presented everything through non-GAAP metrics that strip out over $1 billion in stock-based compensation.
GAAP net income was $477 million on $22.4 billion in revenue. That's a 2.1% net margin. On a $1.4 trillion market cap.
Let me put that in perspective:
3.75 billion shares outstanding. Annualize the Q1 GAAP profit and you get roughly $1.9 billion. That's a trailing P/E ratio north of 700. Use the adjusted number - strip out stock comp, which is a REAL cost to shareholders through dilution - and you're still at around 250x earnings.
All of this is extremely bad, but I didn't even talk about the CAPEX BOMB yet...
3 months ago, Tesla guided to "over $20 billion" in 2026 capital expenditure. Last night they raised it to over $25 billion. A $5 billion increase in a single quarter. That's 3x their historical annual capex run rate - $8.5 billion in 2025, $11.3 billion in 2024. The CFO confirmed on the call that Tesla expects NEGATIVE free cash flow for the rest of the year.
So you have a company generating roughly $6 billion in annual free cash flow on a good year, and they're about to spend $25 billion.
The math doesn't work.
They will almost certainly need to issue equity. Which means dilution. Which means the $1.9 billion in annual earnings gets spread across even MORE shares.
The core auto business is literally deteriorating in real time:
Tesla delivered 358,000 vehicles in Q1 (missed estimates again).
They produced 408,000. That's 50,000 cars sitting on lots that nobody bought.
Inventory days jumped from 10 to 27 in just a few quarters. California (their most important US market) saw registrations crash 24% year over year.
Their market share in the state fell from 9.2% to 7.7%. That's on top of a Q1 2025 that was ALREADY weak from Model Y retooling. They're declining off a decline.
And here's what really kills the bull case...
The entire valuation rests on robotaxis, Optimus robots, and autonomy. So let's put numbers on it:
Waymo - the actual leader in autonomous driving with 15 million completed rides in 2025 alone, over 127 million autonomous miles driven, operating commercially across 6 US cities with plans to expand to 20 more - just raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation.
That's the market's verdict on what the LEADING robotaxi company is worth. $126 billion.
And Waymo is YEARS ahead of Tesla in actual deployment.
Tesla has 3.75 billion shares outstanding. So even if you assign $126 billion in robotaxi value (giving Tesla full credit for matching Waymo despite being nowhere close) that's $33 a share. Add the auto business at generous auto-industry multiples, maybe $20 a share. Throw in energy storage and services, $10-15.
Sum of the parts gets you to roughly $65-70 a share if you're feeling generous. Maybe $50 if you're not.
The stock is $387.
So what exactly are you paying for?
You're paying for a STORY. You're paying for PROMISES that keep getting pushed back, technology that keeps falling short, and a business plan that requires spending $25 billion a year while the core product sells fewer units at declining margins in a market where California sales just fell 24% and the federal EV tax credit is gone.
I managed the number one mutual fund in America. I founded two billion-dollar hedge funds. I've been doing this since 1981.
And I am telling you:
Tesla at $387 is one of the most egregious mispricings I have seen in my entire career.
THE CRASH WILL BE EPIC
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Artificial Intelligence Stocks: The 10 Best AI Companies $NVDA $MSFT $GOOGL money.usnews.com/investing/a…
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Apr 20
Several lawsuits by Tesla owners look to hold the company accountable for overpromising and under-delivering on its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) product on.wsj.com/42iLglm
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Apr 20
Several lawsuits by Tesla owners look to hold the company accountable for overpromising and under-delivering on its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) product on.wsj.com/3Qm7XCv
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Mar 25
Honored to be invited to the White House by the First Lady Melania Trump
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Mar 16
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Wayne Duggan retweeted
Mar 16
This is 100% completely unsustainable as a society.
Nearly 50% of all consumer spending now comes from the top 10% of earners.
The bottom 80%?
Their share keeps falling.
This is why the economy can look strong in the data while millions of people feel like they're falling behind.
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